http://www.youtube.com/afsinterculturalprog

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Social Networks

An odd piece of research has received publicity recently in the US. It's a study that looks at "happiness" and found that happiness seems to be a phenomenon shared via social connections. Happy people tend to be found in the middle of a social network of happy people, but the finding that prompted all the media attention was that people who became happier seemed to increase the happiness not just of their own friends, but also of the neighbors and their friends of their friends -- people they did not even know. But these people had to be close geographically to have an effect, according to the research. Body language, and the sensory experience of seeing and hearing the other person were thought to be important factors in spreading happiness. Curiously, this effect did not happen among work colleagues, which tends to contradict the researchers comparison of this effect to a contagious disease. So it's really social networks that operate here.

Other studies have shown how obesity and smoking patterns follow social networks. Similarly, no doubt, patterns in preferences for music will move along these paths. Perceptions about what is funny, what constitutes success, what is healthy, and what is bad for you are also shared among your social group, even when extended to include the friends of your friends.

What we may be viewing here -- assuming that this study can be replicated elsewhere -- are the paths of culture shifting. "Happiness" is not really an objective state of being, even if statistically valid questionnaire scales can be created to measure it. How people respond to the scales is certainly a cultural product created within the social network subcultures to which they belong and will reflect among other things how they have learned (perhaps recently learned) to perceive themselves and others. Perceiving yourself as "happy" is part of how your group sees itself. And maybe culture shifts also happen with the same needed geographic proximity, though we still don't know the impact of online social network communications like Facebook.

For more on this study, you can read the AARP Bulletin or The New York Times reports.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Collaborating Across Cultures (online)

Last week I attended a one-day conference in Purchase, New York organized by the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning. I was most grateful for the keynote presentation by Doreen Starke-Meyerring on applying the concepts of "genre theory" to intercultural learning and communication. A web search of genre theory produces quite a bit of material on literary typologies or film typologies, but this is not exactly where Doreen was taking us. Instead we were asked to consider a number of everyday aspects of our lives as genres. Genres are "the routine patterns of social action that emerge and evolve in human collectives over time because they meet recurring human needs." I was reminded of a long ago post on this blog, where I wrote about different patterns of jokes in different cultures while looking at why it is so difficult to translate humor from one culture into another. Such jokes involve a repeated, evolving pattern within a cultural context. Had it occurred to me, I might have pointed out that the "knock, knock" joke is an example of a genre. Doreen Starke-Meyerring mentioned other genres: a thank you letter, a wedding invitation, a school transcript, a conference program, a meeting agenda. All of these have a text format, but also include a set of cultural expectations concerning the activities and procedures around them. These genres "organize local activities, reproduce local values, and exert a strong normalizing force through repeated unfolding 'common sense.'" And, like the underwater portion of the "iceberg" analogy of culture, their normality makes them invisible -- until the person crosses cultures. Like the 5 Frameworks discussed frequently in this blog, the study of different genres can be a good starting point for uncovering differences in the structures created and used by a cultural group.

Second Life Experiences in Learning 

One of the most usual plenary presentations I have seen was the presentation by Bryan Carter of the University of Central Missouri, made via his avatar in Second Life. Equipped with the new video camera given to me by my husband, I videotaped sections of this presentation to share with those of you who are also curious about this bit of virtual reality. As we moved from "Virtual Harlem" to "Virtual Montmartre" -- both visual renderings or imaginings of these places as they were in another century -- members of the audience who also had avatars in Second Life joined Carter's avatar for the presentation. These audience avatars stood around (not necessarily facing Carter's avatar), walked here and there, and occasionally fell into the scene from the sky or flew across the screen on a dragonfly. Personally I found this distracting from the main topic, but Carter's students enjoy the fun aspects, they have the chance to collaborate in this platform with students from the Sorbonne on Second Life, and Carter can run his classes sitting Paris, France, instead of Missouri, USA, where his students are enrolled. It raises interesting questions about the outcome of cross-cultural dialog mediated by Second Life avatars, and reminds me of encounters at masked balls or Halloween parties. We don't yet have the answers about how patterns of communication between people using their Second Life identities relates to real world communication, but it Second Life also contains various virtual cultures and patterns of behavior as well as economic and civic communities.

Linked Language Classes

Also exciting was the excellent presentation by Sarah Guth, who teaches English as a Foreign Language at the Faculty of Engineering and Language Centre at the University of Padua. She joined us via Skype video conference from Italy. Though technically not as flashy as Second Life, the content was excellent as she relayed real examples of successful and not-as-successful online collaborations between her English-learning Italian students and the Italian-learning US students. For example, she confirmed that it's not easy to get the students to set up their buddy conversations on their own, and recommended that class time be set aside for these one-on-one language practice sessions. Students' progress was measured by group, peer and self assessments. Sarah's Interculturewiki is a continuous work in progress, and includes many useful links for those just starting to look at intercultural learning. 

As a presenter in the afternoon sessions, I wasn't able to attend the other sessions, but these were also interesting experiments in online collaboration, since each pair of presenters met first online on the COIL wiki to develop the plans for the session, and we met in person for the first time on Thursday evening where we had a chance to talk over our session over a lovely group dinner. My co-presenter is Russian, and he has also lived and taught in Australia and the USA. We came with very different experiences and approaches, but lots of flexibility. Though we outlined our proposals and ideas in the wiki, without the phone call first and the dinner the night before, it would not have been so easy to pull this together as a single session. This is way so many sessions at conferences end up being two or three individual presentations generally addressing a common theme rather than a jointly-run workshop. I felt we were able to link our approaches reasonably well, but only because of the telephone and face-to-face conversations. Even so, we agreed that the second offering of our session -- in spite of a technical problem -- was better than the first, since we'd by then had more experience of each other's style and timing.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Collaborative Learning

I recently came across a very interesting project that linked students learning foreign languages with each other for a guided collaborative learning of each other's culture and language. Cultura Project began in 1997 to link students of French at M.I.T. with students of English at Institut National des Télécommunications in Evry, France. The concept for the program is fairly simple: The students in the USA and the students in France completed similar surveys and then compared results. In this case, the format for these comparisons was bi-lingual, but it was the differences in language use and context in the two languages that seemed to draw the students in.  Does "liberté" in France equal "freedom" in the USA? While this would be a usual translation equivalent, the students in the program discovered some important differences. Similarly they found out why "individualisme" is a negative trait associated with selfishness in France, while "individualism" in the USA is a very highly regarded quality. But it wasn't just about individual word translations, or even about translation itself, but rather about the way language is so tightly connected to the culture in which it is used and how students can be prompted to ask each other about the context and cultural differences that are demonstrated in the different connotations found in the always inadequate translations.

One of the French students, for instance, asked the Americans why they talked so  much about nuclear families. Why do we? Merriam Webster Dictionary dates this usage to 1947, so whoever coined the term was familiar with nuclear bombs. Back then atomic terminology must have been everywhere in the USA. I am reminded also of the old clay and toothpick models of atoms that we made in grade school as part of our science class, with the nucleus at the center. Is that the image? The central part of the family, those different-colored clay bits mashed together, rather than those toothpick-extended parts that include our relatives? Probably none of this happened quite this way in France, but this raises another interesting point about the differences in family structures historically and today.

There are many other fascinating examples in the Cultura Project article and you can follow links to see some of the full examples of the online forums of students. Learning another language does demand that you also learn another cultural perspective. The AFS founders seemed to intuitively recognize the value of this and used the high school exchange program as their means to bring about this new understanding. I think online tools can also help make this happen, and will probably make people want to meet each other in person to build that relationship and enhance that understanding, because face-to-face relationships always do offer much more.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Overcoming First Impressions 

It doesn't take much to start badly when beginning an experience in a new place. Some aspect of the new place may make you feel uncomfortable, something ordinary that you do may anger or annoy others. You might lose something. You might feel that you need more information and have many doubts about your situation abroad. Accidents and misadventures do happen. But sometimes it's simply a rainy day, and you're just not happy to be here.

I recently returned from Barcelona where I spent a week on much-anticipated vacation with my husband, and we began with a number of problems and disappointments. A misunderstanding with the guy who rented us an apartment left him yelling at us for ringing the bell to the wrong apartment when we arrived. We then stood like school children called in front of the headmaster while he lectured us about the dangers of pickpockets and what we were and were not allowed to do in the apartment we rented. The apartment looked stark and uninviting and worst of all, everywhere smelled of cigarettes. We couldn't wait for him to leave so we could open wide the windows and try to freshen the air in the place. The next day we headed to the Ramblas area, me holding tight to my pocketbook the entire time, but I guess not tightly enough since someone picked my wallet and change purse, which I only discovered when I tried to pay for the tea and pastries that we had ordered. The afternoon was then spent contacting our bank and credit card companies and trying to recall how much cash I had had, and when this could possibly have happened. Not a good beginning to say the least, and even the pleasure we had taken in the boqueria market and the flower stalls and the small cafe seem diminished by the tedium of dealing with the theft we had been warned to expect and the lingering cigarette smell that even our fragrant lilies couldn't quite overcome.

Small moments of magic

It is at times like this that I remember so many years ago being in a small cafe, perhaps in Austria, perhaps in Germany, on a road trip with my host family. I am sure that I had some vague fantasy about what my exchange experience would be, though I'm hard pressed to explain what that might have been. Naturally, things had not been going as I had expected, and several times I had reacted very negatively to something that was surely quite ordinary to them but uncomfortable and strange to me. I complained about things I didn't like and I was easily upset. That day I seem to remember feeling car sick and generally cranky, but all that disappeared after a short time spent in that particular cafe. This was something new: people at every table were singing. The songs themselves were unfamiliar to me, but to hear the melodies and to see the eyes of my host mother as she swayed and sang softly and smiled at me ... well, I remember this poorly in detail but it was nevertheless a simple moment of magic, where I felt connected to everyone in the room and understood that life is good even when it is also difficult and disappointing.

And so in Barcelona we looked for simple ways to shift our focus from the unpleasant beginning, to remind us that on balance, life is good, and to make us feel connected to the people and the place. First, we reminded ourselves to look forward to a concert we knew we would enjoy in The Palau de la Música Catalana, and we easily lost ourselves in the beauty of Beethoven's 9th, stunningly directed by Frans Brüggen. In the apartment, our windows opened onto the windows of dozens of Barcelona neighbors, and somehow hearing the various sounds of people living their daily lives alongside of us was familiar and comforting. Like everyone else, we hung out our clothes to dry. The smells of our cooking mixed with those of our neighbors. We heard someone practicing music and we also practiced. We talked to people we met in the shops and restaurants, in the metro or walking in the streets. We asked about the public bicycle rental system, about the length of the school day. We talked about trying to remember to bring our own bags to the grocery store. We asked how to say things in Catalan. We found ourselves in a city filled with people from all over the world. The smell of our coffee overcame the cigarette odors. We referred to the apartment as "home."

It was raining lightly the morning we left. We crossed the street to find a taxi to go to the airport as as we looked for a cab, the woman in the apartment above ours called out to us from her terrace to say goodbye.

Just Cranky

While we could clearly identify the sources of our discomfort when we first arrived in Barcelona, as an exchange student or a newly arrived visitor to a new country and culture, you might not find it so easy to know what makes you feel uncomfortable. Being "cranky" is also part of life -- it's when you just feel like complaining about everything and you don't know what will satisfy you. For me, this happened when I came home, but it can as easily happen at any point in the experience of crossing cultures, or in the midst of transition of any sort. Is that all there is? This is probably one of the ultimate expressions of disappointment. I had expected something better. Those small moments of magic sometimes don't seem to appear when you need them to deal with the mass of demands on you, with the number of things that seem to be going wrong, with all the disappointments. Besides making you annoying to everyone around you, crankiness makes you annoying to yourself. Are you angry? anxious? sad? The answer is probably "yes" to all three, but what is is about? You need to do something about this.

Letting go

Though there are no hard and fast stages of adjustment that are true for each exchange student or each explorer of other cultures, there are certainly cycles of adjustment with their emotional high and low points, and fluctuations between places of comfort and places of anxiety and mistrust.

I was brought up in my culture to believe that I could accomplish whatever I chose to do. Over the years I have come to be quite relieved that this is not really true, and being immersed in other cultures (particularly India and Peru) is what helped me deal with the fact that quite often I am not in control of what happens. But it still happens that I want and expect things to proceed in the way I envision them, especially, perhaps, when I am back home and feel I have the right to expect to be comfortable and at ease. Yet even here I am not fully in control of what happens and sometimes I even here am not fully comfortable. My husband asked me why I was so angry with him, but I think it was more that I was angry with myself, angry that I could not make things happen the way I wanted them to. But this was a clear sign to me that it was time to let go, to stop trying to control how the world spins.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Sometimes the greatest benefit of attending a SIETAR conference is not that you learn new content, but that you learn a new way of communicating that content. SIETAR is the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research which has been around in some form or another for at least 30 years. I typically spend more time with the "R" part, exploring the new research in the intercultural field because I am fascinated by new findings and gain insight by thinking of how these findings apply to the AFS exchange students. Perhaps because I always liked school, the academic approach appeals to me, and after so many years of my youth spent in classrooms and seminars and writing papers, it is now an even more comfortable culture for me than it was when I was in graduate school and would sometimes shudder at the thought of having to undertake Serious Geographic Research. In fact, doing research suits me well and are much less stressful than, say, being at a crowded cocktail party with dozens of people whom I barely know.

What is challenging for me, though, is to know how to train a group, particularly a culturally mixed group which is the norm in AFS. Knowing something about the variety of teaching and learning styles that exist in various cultures is not enough, especially when my goal is to help people learn how to move across cultural styles. So at this conference I found myself drawn to some less academic sessions and found that I learned a lot -- not in terms of new theories about intercultural learning, but quite simply in terms of organizing and presenting very familiar content to people for whom this may be very new. Since we have been doing some of our staff training "virtually" in the past year or two, I wanted to learn more about how this is done and how people take culture into account when working in this way. From the session by Kimberly Blanchard and Pamela Berland Ex, "Virtual Training: Engaging clients anytime, anywhere" I got some of these practical ideas. In particular, I have some new thoughts about improving the assignments between conference calls and some simple pre-training needs assessment that could be done. 

Since I have been focusing a bit on schools and classroom culture, I particularly wanted to look at education across cultures at this conference. Two sessions formed bookends on this topic. Each provided a quick worksheet to assess my own preferences in terms of instructional styles or cultural attitudes toward education. In all cases, I seemed to be seeking a balance between extremes, putting myself largely in the mid-range, with no consistent philosophy of learning or teaching. For me, it usually depends: on the cultures involved, on the age of the students, on the subject matter. Perhaps in a way, that is the point. No one method or style suits every situation and every culture, and even I am constantly changing my ideas and preferences. The first of these sessions was a workshop by Karen Rolston and Jack Lee, "Cultural Perspectives on Teaching and Learning." Though I attended this session by chance since the one I really wanted to attend was canceled, I was pleased with the discussions in our groups and the way the material was presented. Later in the week, Cornelius (Neal) Grove and Astrid Kainzbauer followed up with a workshop on  Instructional Styles in Global Perspective. In the 1980s I worked with Neal Grove at AFS and completed my Ph.D. while working on the AFS Impact study under Neal's guidance. Many familiar themes from Neal's extensive research were included in Neal's presentation, now organized in a very clear structure. But the country-specific challenges were presented by Astrid's personal account of her teaching in Thailand.

I heard a number of personal stories that helped me connect to other cultures and how different people make sense of the world. One of the first was Nancy Adler's story -- or perhaps more specifically, her mother's story. While similar in many aspects to numerous stories I have heard over the years about Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, hers was still unique and moving. Sometimes the best stories were ones that came out accidentally in small sessions or over coffee: stories of growing up with parents of different cultures like Nancy's, or stories about the challenges of teaching abroad, of marrying someone from another culture, and of living abroad generally.

In my last blog I wondered about the influence of the local Granada culture on the SIETAR conference. In addition to the Flamenco performance and the Alhambra tour planned for the program, I was also pleased with the many young Spanish volunteers in conference T-shirts who were ready to talk and find  solutions, such as helping me correct the Spanish subtitles on my Power Point slides. Though they were busy with other tasks assigned to them, they made time to talk to me rather than directing me elsewhere. Lunch was a comfortable 2 hours each day and a huge space was provided for coffee and pastries or cookies, with plenty of tables for small groups to stand around and talk. The poster sessions also took place in this large space. This large space was also the communications center: where to find colleagues, where to learn about conference logistics (usually verbally and through word of mouth), and to discuss the sessions attended.

The conference was very different from the SIETAR-USA conferences I have attended and I think this was a good thing. I never liked the geographic split of SIETAR into regional and local entities, though it does make it easier for interested people to meet, and new SIETAR organizations have emerged in Italy and in Arabia just recently. I hope that the various SIETAR organizations may join together again and start to consider some of the virtual tools that several sessions addressed and planning some SIETAR global virtual conferences. The fact that SIETAR conferences are almost entirely dependent on volunteers makes it challenging to organize something on the global level. Financial sponsorship of the conference was crucial, as well as participation fees from those attending. But it also depends to a large extent on the membership and each SIETAR organization is quite different. All the more challenging it must have been to create this global conference.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International

I traveled today from Berlin, Germany to Granada Spain. I've been to Granada one other time a few years ago when we were exploring Andalusia but now I am here for the SIETAR Global conference which opens tomorrow night. So far we are just getting started, but already I am struck at how very different Granada feels from Berlin. There is the obvious visual difference in the Spanish blue of the Andalusian sky, and the architecture and climate, of course and the very different histories of these two places. And there is the difference that here we are staying in a private apartment rather than a hotel. This saves money and brings us closer to the daily life of the place. But on top of all this, there is the very different type of energy found in the culture of the two cities.

And it is interesting to me to compare the conferences we had in Berlin with the sessions I will be attending here. AFS and SIETAR are two different organizational cultures, but both have a multinational membership and a specific interest in learning about other cultures. In both cases, I feel sure, the local culture will have its influence even as people sit in conference rooms and listen to presentations from professionals and academics from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds speaking to these topics.

You can get a good sense of the "Moving Beyond Mobility" conference from the press release we have on our web site. As a member of the steering committee from that conference, I am especially pleased with the excitement generated by the different sessions and the sense that this was a new kind of conference. Because of the limited space we had in the beautiful historic building, we had some challenges that were carefully considered by the logistics team in Germany who needed everyone to sign up for specific sessions in advance so that the appropriate rooms could be assigned and enough chairs allocated. In addition, in order to provide simultaneous translation in the largest room, a special arrangement needed to be made so that the microphones fed only into headsets rather than into loud speakers so that the other sessions in adjoining rooms would not be distracted. Very careful and thoughtful plans, but also very complex from an American perspective. So many aspects are taken into consideration to ensure a successful conference. People need to cooperate with the plans to make everything happen as it should. So at one point all 275 participants needed to leave the room and go directly to the coffee break so that some of the chairs could be redistributed to other rooms. With the excitement and goodwill of the participants, the arrangements did work smoothly but at other times in Germany it came to me clearly that I am used to a culture that is more loosely planned and where you can, for instance, decide to view an exhibition backwards if you wish, and where it is a goal to keep processes fairly simple.

I am curious to find out how much the culture of Granada permeates the SIETAR Global conference, which starts on Thursday. I expect the sessions to be quite different from SIETAR-USA meetings and look forward to finding out more. One thing seems certain: There is also a good energy here, already evident from the many SIETAR participants on the flight form Madrid this morning.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Photos from the Moving Beyond Mobility Conference, October 13-14, Berlin Germany.

I want to direct you to our AFS web site for information about the Moving Beyond Mobility Conference which took place this week (October 13-14, 2008) in Berlin. It was exciting to be involved in this event, attended by some 275 people from 46 countries. It combined presentations of recent research on exchanges and of reports on interesting and successful educational programs connected with exchange programs. Many of the studies presented showed different ways in which students are impacted by their study abroad experience while some dealt with the challenges faced by students studying abroad and how students (and sometimes host families) can increase their learning and insight and deal with the dissonance of encountering cultural differences. The conference closed with a panel looking at some of the obstacles to student exchange, and a call for action to nations and ministries of education to break down some of these obstacles and to provide increased opportunities for students to study abroad.

I always wonder why it is that so many ministries of education and individual schools do not allow students to receive credit for the time spent studying abroad. For many of our AFS students, to go on a year-long exchange program means spending one more year of high school back in their home countries to "make up" for the missed courses in their academic program. And yet these students have spent their year attending high school, living daily and studying in a foreign language, gaining new insights into their own culture and history as well as that of their host country. It is in all respects a more challenging year than they would have spent at home, and one that has a strong impact leading them to seek out additional opportunities to reach out across cultures, learn additional languages, and to seek career and volunteer opportunities that bring them in contact with people from other backgrounds. Most of all, they are more confident about their abilities to adapt to new situations and more comfortable to be around people from other cultures.

We would like to see it become a very normal thing for students to take the opportunity to study abroad, especially in the context of immersion programs with host families and where they study with students from the local community rather than in international student communities. We also want to help the schools make the most of the exchange experience for the entire school community. More on this in future issues.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research, AFS International

in Berlin, Germany

Newly Dependent

Coming here to Berlin for the first time has reminded me how easily one can suddenly feel very dependent on others in a new place when you don't speak the language. Even the simplest everyday activities can be challenging when you don't know how these things are done here. I remember several years ago in Germany when I took the train from Luxembourg to Frankfurt with a change at Cologne. Not difficult to do, but when I handed my ticket to the conductor, I learned that I was on the local train to Cologne, not the express, and therefore I would miss my connection to Frankfurt. Knowing my friend would be waiting for me in Frankfurt, and without a cell phone, I had to try to telephone him in Cologne. This was not so simple to do. First was the matter that I needed to purchase a card for the telephone system. Then, as I held the newly purchased phone card in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, I realized that I could not figure out how to operate the telephone and could not understand the instructions written in German. So I stood on the platform and said loudly to anyone who might listen, "Is there anyone here who speaks English and could help me use the telephone?" The person who responded did not speak English very much, in fact, but was able to demonstrate the use of the phone card so that I was able to make my phone call.

I felt like this again yesterday, when told that I could just take the tram three stops to find a shopping center, and was handed a tram map. This was not the kind of map I expected, with streets and the hotel clearly marked but rather a schematic representation of the tram lines. Jet lagged and feeling cramped from long hours in a tight airplane seat, at that point, I didn't even know which direction to turn when I left the hotel. I wasn't sure I had the energy to scout on my own for the aspirin to soothe my aching muscles, to approach people to ask directions with my phrase-book, mispronounced German, or to deal with remembering landmarks on my path to find my way back again.

Typically when I travel to new places, I need a day or two to settle in. I like to walk around the area of the hotel on the first day or two to know where I am and register it as familiar territory. After this initial phase, I am ready to travel further and further from my base, creating an increasingly large area of familiar space. I like to look for my own brand of landmarks: places that leave an impression on me, that I will easily remember. But until I feel familiar with the immediately surrounding base territory, I am often surprised to find how timid and tentative I feel. I need to take my time and know where I am. It always surprises me since eventually I always enjoy discovering new places and have little fear of getting lost.

I expect that this is also a common experience for some of our exchange students, who might need or want to stay closer to their new home in the first days of their experience before they have the comfort and curiosity to move out further. Even with personal relationships, it may be easier for some to talk mostly to the host brothers and sisters and the host parents, while meeting other students in the school might proceed more slowly as they build up some confidence in their "base territory" of relationships.

At this point, I am ready to explore Berlin in full, but must postpone at least some of that while I attend conference meetings. In truth, traveling for work usually doesn't allow one the kind of time needed to get much beyond the base territory. The exchange students, on the other hand, will still have lots of time to take the slow start they may need.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Shocks to the Senses

I've focused quite a bit in this blog on sensory perception because this is often the source of the first impression of "foreignness" for exchange students. Tastes, smells, sounds, the quality of the light: these are the aspects that can shock or reassure, and may be the first things that we will react to and judge when we approach another culture.

Years ago we did some research concerning students who returned home early. Though only a small percentage of all students on the AFS program returned early, we found in each of the two years we studied that there were some exchange students who arrived and almost immediately felt uncomfortable and homesick. Sometimes a small medical problem or some bad news from back home provided the excuse to give up on this new culture and just go home, but even a loving phone call from a parent could trigger homesickness and the desire to return early.

I understand why. At age 10, I could not last even a week away from home while at a children's summer camp. I was a fussy eater and did not like the smells of the kitchen. Worse than that were the wet floors in the large common bathroom shared by all the girls in my cabin. I had wanted so much to go to summer camp, but my fantasy about going to camp didn't include smells of unfamiliar food and slightly run-down facilities where the toilets didn't always flush.

Even now so many years later my memories of that week include much more than the bad smells, the gnawing feelings, or the tears. I also remember a magical evening sleeping under the stars, the taste of orange juice sucked through peppermint sticks, the songs I learned. And I wonder why these happy moments didn't more than balance the awkwardness I felt, the food I didn't like and the wet bathroom. As an adult, none of this would be terribly important to me, but at age 10 I was overwhelmed. Certainly it was NOT the fact that I was hit in the head with a baseball on the second day and was taken to the doctor's office, nor the fact that the saddle and I slid off the back of a horse the next day during one of the horseback riding lessons. I was not hurt or even bothered much by these events, but they provided a needed excuse to return early. Most of all, I believe, it was the daily letters from home that pulled me to end my one-week summer camp after 5 days.

Rather than daily letters, exchange students today have an array of options to stay in touch with their families and friends back home, and are likely to talk with their parents regularly, not just exchange email. The frequency of communication can be problematic, but it is the nature of the communication with the parents that may nudge an anxious student toward an early end to the experience. Parents who find themselves on one end of such a conversation will do well to remember that their daughter or son needs:

• to feel confident that she is capable of handling the experience;
• to know that her parents are managing fine at home without her; and
• to recognize that she will not always feel this way.

Abroad for the First Time

I returned Saturday night from a visit to Minneapolis for the IDI conference where I talked about how AFS is using Intercultural Development Inventory and the underlying theory of the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. In one of the sessions that afternoon, I was struck in particular by Paula Pedersen's research concerning a program of US university students studying abroad in England in what is known as an "island" program, where students travel abroad in a chaperoned group and study together in another country. The students in this program came with very little previous exposure to other places or cultures. For most of them, this was their first exposure to another culture. Dr. Pedersen's students tended to cluster together much of the time, and needed to be challenged through their course work to break away from their group and move out into the host culture. She used coursework assignments to get the students more involved in the host culture and to make the program more beneficial to them.

Getting the balance right between support and challenge is the key to the learning process and an important aspect of program design. Living with a host family as the AFS students do, the support provided by the host family is frequently packaged with the biggest intercultural challenge our students face. We will be focusing more in future issues on the preparation and support needs of host families.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

AFS Returnee, Kylie Hitchcock of New Zealand, is a guest blogger this week.

One Teacher's Experience

Having a foreign exchange student in the classroom provides the extra perspective that this student offers to the overall learning. In a multicultural society like New Zealand, many students in the classroom come from diverse and quite different backgrounds. However it is sometimes difficult to draw the various perspectives this offers out in the classroom as the other students are so familiar with the backgrounds of the other children they see regularly it doesn’t seem special in any way. However with a foreign exchange student in the class the background difference becomes obvious. Drawing on this difference, and celebrating it within the classroom environment as part of the learning, not only includes the foreign student in the class, it also offers opportunities for local students to understand the exchange student and other cultural backgrounds much better. It also provides an avenue for local students to inquire into and celebrate their own backgrounds and cultural differences.

As a social studies / geography teacher I can draw on the experiences and perspectives of exchange students in most learning topics (if not all). For example in Year 12 Sociology we were looking at the institution of ‘the family’. It was wonderful to discuss this with the two exchange students in the class at the time, and then other students in the class (for example Maori, Korean, Tongan) were able to offer their perspectives. The Pakeha (European New Zealander) students also contributed, explaining their perspectives and experiences. Explaining to others is a great way to learn! It was an excellent session with wonderful class input, and I was able to relate my own experiences and perspectives gained when I was an AFS student to Czechoslovakia/Slovakia.

Having a foreign exchange student in the class;

• Allows students to explain concepts to others from outside the New Zealand culture, thus allowing the local student to view the learning more objectively from a broader perspective.
• Offers a wonderful learning resource.
• Makes the world seem smaller and more ‘homely’! *
• Allows students to see and celebrate the diversity we have in our global society.

Kylie Hitchcock

* A note for American speakers of English:  Kylie's use of "homely" here offers a good example of how language use evolves and varies from culture to culture, even when the language is basically the same as it is for New Zealand and the USA. She does not mean that the world seems smaller and plainer or uglier, but smaller and more home-like, or "homey" as we would say in the USA. One can speculate on how this positive meaning to the word might have become corrupted in the USA, but here is an explanation: "homely." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 22 Sep. 2008. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/homely>.

Lessons from an intercultural training program

I am writing this as I return from Costa Rica where I presented training programs in intercultural topics to AFS program staff from some 20 countries. Coming as it did in the midst of a flurry of other activities -- in particular my preparation for my plenary presentation at the Moving Beyond Mobility conference next month in Berlin -- I made this a very short trip, not even staying for the whole program.

I brought to the training the influence from several recent experiences for which I am very grateful. Domo arigato gozaimasu to Hayashi-sensei and his 3-day workshop on perceptual flexibility I attended this past July at the Intercultural Communications Institute's Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC). This workshop profoundly affected my thinking in a number of ways. Ever since that workshop I have been working on a story that would communicate my vision for the way AFS should think about the way it approaches the orientation and support of our participants. I read my most recent draft to the 20 or so people attending the optional evening session on orientation. It's only one page. But as I read the story I felt the room grow quiet. From time to time as I looked up from my paper I returned the gazes of those sitting in whatever direction I was looking. Reading the next to the last sentence, I felt my own emotional reaction to the story, and I knew I had at least struck a chord in my own very deep commitment to AFS.

Timing may not be everything

With the advanced intercultural learning group, I wanted to try something similar to a couple of the training activities that I experienced or learned about from Hayashi's workshop. Having an internationally diverse group made this quite interesting. I had each person rate herself or himself according to the frequency with which employed various goals for communication (link to old post on this). Then half the people were asked to face away from the screen while the other half sought to describe or talk about this image to them, using one of the goals that they seldom used in their communication. Some people tried to be more direct, some to make the other person feel comfortable, some to express their true feelings. I didn't know how long to let the conversation go on but the conversation pairs were going strong until at some point I heard the volume drop as pair after pair became more quiet. I took this as a signal to stop and debrief, but now I wonder what might have happened had I waited a bit longer. Would there have been total silence at some point or a new round of chatter?

In the debriefing, some people did admit to feeling "silly" or uncomfortable trying this out, but I think the AFS staff may well be an audience that is flexible enough to participate gamely in spite of any discomfort. It was interesting also to hear some of the ways in which the listeners found that they had imagined a somewhat different picture, based on what they heard, than they now had with the photograph they actually saw.

Another activity I tried with this group was also interesting, but my timing was poor. A "digitally" oriented team received copies of printed news stories concerning my own neighborhood, while the "analog" team instead received a stack of photographs of my neighborhood, some of which I found on the web and others that I took specifically for the workshop to give people a sense of the place and culture. Two issues of timing came up. First, naturally, was that the analog team working with the photos was much more quickly able to grasp intuitively the whole sense of the neighborhood, while the digital team needed time to decode the written information -- additionally difficult because it was in English and almost no one in that group was a native English speaker. But both groups did very well with the tools they had. Coming back together, the groups reported to each other and filled in their gaps, but ideally the activity should have gone further. What I had not taken into consideration was the fact that I had deliberately chosen a local culture that was unfamiliar to everyone. But this also meant that they had no personal experience to convey, and even with the combined analog and digital information, there was still a cultural context that they lacked and this limited their possibility to extend the discussion.

D.I.V.E. = Describe, Interpret, VALIDATE, Explain (then Evaluate)

Do you know what this object is on the left? This was the image I used in the introductory session on intercultural learning. I could have brought the thing with me, but I didn't want it to take up the space in my suitcase so I decided to use a photo projected in full screen mode instead. When one member of my audience offered the possible interpretation that this might be a bomb -- it's not, of course -- I decided there was yet another reason it was better for me to present this as a photo than to put the actual object in my checked luggage. To find out what this is, you'll have to send me a message with your own three interpretations.

I used Kiran Cunnningham's "D.I.V.E." method, with this photo as the example, then I gave each group of about 3 participants a snapshot that I had selected from my own collection of ordinary photos with people I know from various places, very much influenced by a similar activity suggested by Hilary E. Khan, combining it with the "Describe, Interpret, Validate, and Explain" method. I want to thank both these anthropologists for the insights I gained from their NAFSA pre-conference workshop on anthropological methods in intercultural training. See my previous post, Eyes on NAFSA (part 1). The validation process was simply my own explanation of what was going on when I took the photo and what meaning I give to it.

The Intercultural Classroom

I also very much want to thank Jaime Wurzel for making a video several years ago illustrating a range of cultural differences in the context of a classroom. We showed the half-hour video (including the optional English subtitles for easier understanding for all our non-native English speakers) and conducted the first activity on values orientation. Other than ensuring that we had a decent sound system and proper set up, making copies of the first activity worksheet, and introducing the film and activity, there was little else that I needed to prepare to have a very informative session with a lively discussion. Though the film is set in a US university level classroom with a few US students and several international students discussing the international treaty on Antarctica, our largely European staff were able to connect the content quite easily to their own context of working with exchange students in their own country's high schools. A couple of the participants came up to me afterwards, looking for information on how to buy the DVD for use with the high schools in their own country. The information is here: A Different Place: The Intercultural Classroom and you can view a trailer for the video.

Jaime Wurzel's video gives a good sense of the problems that students (and teachers) experience when cultural expectations don't match, but next week guest blogger Kylie Hitchcock, a social studies/geography teacher (and AFS Returnee) in New Zealand, will describe some of her positive experience and the value of having exchange students in the classroom.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

When is formal more comfortable?

Many years ago when my grandmother was still alive but already in her 90s, she was hospitalized for some emergency surgery that saved her life for several more years. I visited her in the hospital and remember my sense of shock that the nurses aides who were about my age were calling my grandmother by her first name. At that time I still called all my parents friends by their titles and family names: Mr. and Mrs. Glen, Mrs. Hanson, Mrs. Murphy, Mr. and Mrs. Daniels. I knew their first names, of course, because they were all good friends of my parents, but using their first names seemed disrespectful. I wondered how my grandmother felt, being called "Agnes" by such a young woman.

I started thinking about this after reading my colleague, Chander's recent blog where he provided a slide show of various communication styles presented as bimodal contrasts: direct and indirect, linear and circular, and formal and informal among others.

These days, communication in the USA is largely informal. I no longer expect the nurses' aides taking care of my mother call her Mrs. Hansel, though my husband does. And I rarely think of calling myself Mrs. Hansel or expecting anyone else to do so. The opinion seems to be that speaking informally to people will make them feel more comfortable, that it's more friendly, or that it's more candid and therefore trustworthy. Formal speech may seem insincere. We use casual styles of speaking because we like to view others as our equals. But even when we are not being rehearsed for an audience with Queen Elizabeth, there are many occasions when speaking informally seems startling, particularly when visitors from other countries are involved. My husband and I still laugh at the time when we took a European guest to a restaurant nearby. To order a beer with his meal, our guest asked the waitress, "May I have a Heineken?" to which she simply answered, "No." After we all had a good laugh, she explained that, in fact, they were out of that particular brand.

In places where a more formal approach is the norm, it can have the advantage of making relationships more predictable, especially between strangers. One might have expected our waitress to respond, "I'm terribly sorry, but we are out of that brand at the moment. May I suggest another?" But maybe in a culture with a more formal communication style, a restaurant may quickly alter its menu if a particular item is unavailable in order to avoid confusion.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education & Research

AFS International

How should teachers work with exchange students who are learning the language?

With thousands of AFS students newly arrived in their host country, one of the first challenges they face is the language. In the first days they will resort to some non-language communication: pointing to things, drawing pictures, using gestures and facial expressions. You may have seen a small booklet created for the traveler who doesn't speak the language. Point It by Dieter Graf is one example that has become fairly popular. Yet this approach can only go so far. After one's basic needs for food, toilet, shower and sleep are satisfied, it becomes difficult to rely solely on non-verbal communication.

Teachers hosting exchange students in their classroom may feel that it is important to correct the students' language errors to help them learn to speak and write correctly. But this may not always be helpful. Here are some guidelines:

1. Is the student generally confident and self-assured? Confident students are more likely to be able to benefit from some correction when they make language mistakes, but learning a new language can be a source of anxiety for those contemplating traveling to or living in another country. They may worry too much about making mistakes. This may be especially true in school, where students often feel that they are constantly judged. (In a previous post I described my experience in school of the red marks on my papers, correcting my French.) Students who are already a bit nervous may not be helped if their errors are constantly corrected, especially while they are struggling to make themselves understood. It may be more important to hear and understand what they are trying to communicate without worrying about the grammatical mistakes.
2. Did the student make a mistake that may embarrass him? Sometimes in trying to use the language the students accent or choice of words may give his words an unwelcome nuance. In these cases is it important that the students are aware of the double meaning they may have created, particularly if it has already provoked laughter in the classroom. It is helpful to provide a way for the student to remember the correct use so that he can use it confidently the next time. Any little gimmick such as a string of common words that rhyme with the mispronounced word, or an image to remember that will guide the student to the correct usage can help. Consider helping the student privately as well rather than in front of other students.
3. Are you unable to understand what the student said? If you cannot comprehend the student's language, you will need some special patience. Accept some of the responsibility for the failure of the message. The student may be speaking the correct words but because of the unfamiliar "melody" she gives to these words, you may not recognize what she said because your ear is not attuned to that particular accent. Give the student time to try again. Perhaps the student can also write down what she said or use some non-verbal communication.

The more the student uses the language and is able to successfully communicate his or her message, the more confident he or she will become, and the more open to accepting correction in the desire to improve.

Written Language

Written language is generally quite different from the way the same language is spoken. Anyone who has struggled with English spelling, whether as a foreign language or as part of learning your own language, will immediately recognize that pronunciation may not always be a good guide for writing the words. Competitive "spelling bees" where children are lined up and given words to spell correctly, are so common in the USA that a few years ago a documentary featuring the children and families in a national spelling bee became quite popular, followed by a Broadway musical production on the same theme. 

Some weeks ago a colleague from Paraguay was commenting on his impression of how strange this musical must seem to Spanish speakers, whose language is very phonetic and spelling presents few problems for native speakers once they have learned the alphabet.

Recently from the UNESCO web site I found a booklet on "Why language matters" dealing with literacy. In it was this very interesting map of scripts and alphabets used around the world. (The map links to the booklet.) One of the issues with the global digitalization of language is the huge number and diversity of written scripts. I was reminded of the problems I had faced during my time as director of systems at AFS several years ago. At that time, creating a database that  could work with Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Thai seemed impossible. Chinese characters are double-byte characters while the Thai script uses one and a half byte symbols compared with the single byte of the Roman alphabet. Even diacritical marks posed problems not that many years ago and still sometimes are mis-coded when sent through certain email systems or with old web browsers.

Exchange students immersed in their host culture are likely to advance quickly with the spoken language and might be able to read reasonably well, but to be able to write like a native writer takes considerably more practice. It is not just the spelling or the script that presents the problems, though these can be very challenging in some languages. Many students will try to translate the conventions of their home country's written language, which might either seem too simplistic or terrible convoluted or difficult to understand in the host country language. A good exercise for exchange students is to have a small, ungraded written assignment of a page or a paragraph every day. The teacher can judge the progress being made after a few weeks and, observing the patterns of errors being made, can gently guide the student to improve his or her writing.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International   

What makes you anxious? 

Thursday night there was another shooting in front of the apartment building a block and a half from my house. This is probably the 5th shooting I know about in as many years. Other than a listing on the crime map of the Gothamist of a "shooting, 8/21/2008 7:44 p.m."there has been no news to be found. Information on the neighborhood blog from a "newbie" to the forum said that "someone was shot in both arms and legs." Another posting on the same forum came from someone who said the police told him the guy would live. While this was happening, I was thinking about anxiety as it relates to the research I've been doing, and reading a colleague's blog about her recurring panic attacks. But I heard nothing. I only found out about the shooting when my husband came home and asked me what happened. Our road was blocked off and the police were out in force but I had heard nothing. 

I  am not an anxious person by nature but I see how even a little level of nervousness affects me when it comes to interacting with the many people that live in that apartment building. I smile and say hello to the mothers and children on the stoop, but I don't know any of them by name. I recognize and greet several in the group of mature gentlemen who regularly sit out front on folding chairs and we joke a little. I like them, and feel comfortable around them, but nevertheless very soon I continue on my way. I can't call this a real relationship, but we know each other a little bit. When these men are not there and when no children are playing on the sidewalk, then very occasionally someone or something I see on that block makes me suspicious and I watch carefully while also trying to make it seem that I do not notice anything unusual. In these moments, I am nervous, and I greet no one.

The research I've been doing at AFS looks specifically at the level of anxiety or discomfort or awkwardness that people report feeling when they are interaction with people from other cultures. It also looks at how safe they feel in their own neighborhoods, and while traveling. From Mitch Hammer's research in 2002 we learned that AFS students generally have substantially less anxiety around other cultures after their experience with AFS than the did before they left, and this is much different from their friends who do not go abroad. We now also know that this lower level of anxiety around other cultures is also found among our older alumni, who are significantly less anxious, or more comfortable, around other cultures than their peers. Reports on these studies can be downloaded from www.afs.org/research.

Considering the effect of my own anxiety barometer around the nearby apartment building, I realize how important it is to be able to reduce anxiety and how powerful the AFS experience is. By providing a teenager the opportunity to live as a member of a family in another culture, they are expanding the definition of what is safe and comfortable for them to do. I firmly believe we are enabling them to establish more friendships and deep relationships with people who are very different from themselves.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Classroom Cultures

Every year, AFS sends close to 10,000 secondary school students from some 50 countries to attend high school in another country, for a year, a semester, or a few months. For most of these students the first days in the new school are as confusing as they are exciting. Their challenges with the language account for only part of this confusion. In many cases they hardly know what is expected of them. Teachers and students in the classroom in their host country behave very differently than they are used to. Students going to Japan may be quite surprised to find that they are expected to clean the school building. Students going to the USA may be unprepared for the weekly schedule that has them shifting to a new classroom with a new group of students every hour. Students used to listening to formal lectures and remembering what has been taught may wonder what is going on if the teacher walks in, sits on the edge of the desk, and starts asking the students questions.

Learning Styles

In the USA these days there are many educators who feel it is much more important for the student to learn how to think and how to learn, and that the particular "facts" can always be easily looked up on the internet if they are important. An example is this older post from the blog, Dangerously Irrelevant.  In this post Scott McLeod may seem to compare the available memory space in the human brain to that of a computer's hard drive. Why not off load some of the facts that aren't immediately needed to some external hard drive like wikipedia where they can always be found?

I apologize here to Scott for misrepresenting somewhat his more thoughtful and nuanced perspective so that I can highlight a contrasting perspective. I do agree that learning how to learn helps a student achieve and grow in the USA. However, when one relies too much on the ability to look up information when needed, sometimes facts are simply ignored. We have seen many times over the years in our US political system, where candidates will state opinions and present their solutions to national and world problems supported by "facts" that could be seen as merely placeholders for a URL hyperlink to the actual statistics, which anyone could find if they felt they were really important, but few people really know or can even judge if the facts are true or misleading.

In classrooms in many other parts of the world, learning facts is critically important.  Facts are seen to be important pieces of information that are known to be true, and on which to base your understanding and conclusions about the world. I recommend seeing Jaime Wurzel's video, The Intercultural Classroom. The trailer on the site gives you a taste of this and other cultural differences in teaching style.

Teachers may not be aware of how much of their pedagogy depends on the cultural context the students bring to it. Even exchange students who have excellent language skills may talk less than expected because they don't know what to talk about. They may not be used to a format that asks them to state and defend their own opinion about anything from abstract art to environmental policy. "How do I find out what is the right answer?" they may wonder. It can be difficult to understand that the teacher believes there is no right answer, only good arguments. Well, what makes a good argument? In cultures that emphasize harmony rather than debate, arguments may be avoided in favor of relationship building. US teachers in particular who have exchange students like this in their classrooms can help, first by being aware that the student is working from a different context, and then by deliberately teaching the expected structure of a logical argument.

Similarly, US students who are used to being asked their opinion on all sorts of issues may have more trouble remembering the key facts that may be required of them, or starting their essays with a relevant theory rather than with a specific anecdote or example. The inductive approach of drawing connections between individual examples to create a theory is more popular in the US, while in France, it is more typical to create the theory on principles and then deduce the examples. Again, being aware of this potential cause for the students apparently poorer performance can provide some insight on what hidden lessons need to be deliberately taught to these students.

These new challenges for the exchange student are an important part of the learning that takes place through cultural immersion, and AFS thanks the teachers around the world who are welcoming our students into their classroom. On our AFS International web site we hope some of the information we have provided for schools will prove useful for the teachers and school administrators who work every day with exchange students like ours.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International

Private Lives

In the early hours of the morning when I was somewhere between awake and asleep and with my eyes still closed, my attention was drawn to a slightly smoky, slightly spicy and faintly familiar odor. I hesitated a minute before I recognized what it was. It was a smell I remembered from India. Opening my eyes I realized where it was coming from. I had put an Indian bed sheet on my bed for the summer when I don't need the additional warmth of a blanket. And it's a beautiful sheet which I brought back from India ... in 1992. It's been through numerous washes over the years but still has not lost its color, nor has it completely lost its odor, at least in my dreams.

It reminded me of the lingering traces of the cultural assumptions and patterns of behavior we learn in childhood that still cling to us long after our context changes and we intend to take on a new pattern. Like the storks who no longer bother to fly after living under nets as fledglings, we sometimes find it hard to escape those ingrained patterns and beliefs even when we have every reason to escape them. One of these ingrained patterns for me is my reluctance to ask people about their relationships, their feelings, their opinions. It's somewhat of a joke that I am always the last person to know the office gossip.

And I know where it comes from:

"Mind your own business!"

Somehow the pattern emerged when I was still a child that some questions I asked were perceived as prying into affairs that were private to the individuals involved and therefore should be none of my concern. Not wanting to be a "busybody" or gossip, I learned to refrain from asking people questions about their personal lives. If they wanted me to know, they would tell me. I learned I shouldn't ask. Now this seems to me to be an extreme form of the concern for privacy that was characteristic of the US culture during the time I was growing up.

"Don't ask. Don't tell."  

A familiar restriction on asking about other people's private lives was made a policy in the US military during the Clinton administration. While intended to find a way to allow homosexuals to serve in the military rather than automatically being discharged, the essence of the policy was this: Your private behavior may be contrary to military regulations, but at long as I don't ask you about it and you don't tell me about it, then we agree that it doesn't exist.  But of course, this does mean that I can't know you very well or really be a close friend, and I may have to pretend not to recognize some essential aspects of your identity because they are different than what is allowed.

Today, one the one hand there are myriad privacy policies that we acknowledge reading even when we don't, while on the other people seem very willing to tell all sorts of things about themselves to almost anyone. And they are being judged on what they put out there, with stars, comments, and sharing on Facebook.

"I don't mean to pry, but . . . "

I still worry about invading someone's privacy. Am I someone you trust enough to share these details of you life with me? This timid restraint that prevents me from getting to know you is not so useful to me these days. I now believe that it doesn't so much protect your privacy as it locks out our opportunities for meaningful exchanges. And for relationships across cultures, or even across genders, it is absolutely necessary to ask questions and show my curiosity and my interest in your life because I cannot assume that my own experience gives me the basis to understand yours. If I am to understand who you are, will need you to tell me, and if you don't think to do so, I'll have to ask.

"Curiosity killed the cat."

How many times did I hear this growing up? Don't be curious? Curiosity is dangerous? Why was this value promoted? But it's not so easy to lose the old habits. I still hesitate.

Bettina Hansel
Director of Intercultural Education and Research
AFS International